What Days of the Week are Most Popular for MLB Games?
Baseball is considered to be America’s greatest pastime. The sport has been around for centuries and takes up a good chunk of the year, stretching from April to October with even spring training games taking place in February. The regular season stretches over 162 games which are played anywhere from early in the morning to late into the evening. Typically during the regular season games are played on almost every day of the week. This invites an interesting question, what days are the most popular for both fan attendance and revenue? Do day games and night games factor in? Through the Major League Baseball data collected we can try to get a grasp of which days are the most popular during the regular season.
Aggregating the data into a pivot table we can begin to dissect which days are more popular in terms of attendance which in turn can give us insight on revenue. A quick google search highlighted that the average ticket price in 2023 was $37 and if we assume that every attendee is buying an average ticket we can get a rough estimate of sales revenue. While this ticket revenue will in no way be completely accurate it could give some insight to game schedulers. By separating the day games and night games per day of the week we can easily see that day games are less popular than night games by significant margins. In fact there are no days in which a night game has less attendance than games played during the day. While day games might be less popular in terms of attendance to their night counterparts, there are still certain days where day games are incredibly popular. Starting at the least popular day in terms of attendance, are day games that occur on Tuesdays. Games that occur on Tuesdays when the sun is up see an average of 4000 in attendance. This makes sense as Tuesday is towards the middle of the week and many folks are most likely too busy working to attend. Interestingly enough the second least popular day of the week for attending day baseball games is Friday with 4255 in average attendance. Friday’s day attendance is less than Mondays(5000), Wednesdays(6000), and Thursdays(6703). However, all these days are significantly less than the weekends with Saturday having 12,874 in average attendance and Sunday having a whopping 21,172 in attendance. Based on this data we can conclude that Sunday day games are the most popular in terms of average attendance than any other day of the week.
As for night average attendance, the numbers stay fairly close together. The least popular days for attendance are Tuesdays(19816), Wednesdays(19225), and Thursdays(19945). Following closely are Monday night games with an average attendance of 20,251. These Monday night games are likely very popular due to many coming off the highs of the weekend. The top three days with the most attendance at Major League Baseball games are Friday with 25,174, Saturday with 31,166, and Sunday with 32,721. This makes the most sense since these days are when most people have time off from work to go enjoy a baseball game. This data highlights and reinforces the popularity of hosting games at night on the weekends. Teams that play during these times should expect to see higher numbers of attendance and in turn a higher revenue share from ticket sales. Weekend evening games crush every other day of the week in terms of average attendance and should be prioritized by game schedulers if they want to increase their revenue from ticket sales. In comparison to day games night games see on average much higher attendance
In conclusion, the attendance data for Major League Baseball data sheds light on the varying patterns of fan attendance across different days of the week, particularly in the context of day and night games. Our findings indicate a general preference for night games over day games especially when the games take place on the weekend. Tuesdays and Fridays stand out as the least attended for day games which are likely influenced by midweek work commitments. The weekends, especially Sunday, tend to show a substantial surge in attendance for both day and night games.
